


abnormal metamorphosis

by protagonistic



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Abstract, Acceptance, Alone, Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Being Lost, Betrayal, Bleak, Blood, Blood and Gore, Blood and Torture, Cannibalism, Centipede Kaneki Ken, Character Death, Confusion, Corpses, Crazy, Dark, Dark Past, Dead People, Death, Depressing, Depression, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Disturbing Themes, Drama, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Everyone is Dead, Fear, Feels, Foreshadowing, Forgive Me, Good and Evil, Gore, Graphic Description of Corpses, Hallucinations, Help, Horror, Humanity, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, Identity Issues, Illusions, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Insanity, Internal Conflict, Internal Monologue, Kuroneki | Black-haired Kaneki, Loss, Loss of Control, Loss of Innocence, M/M, Memories, Memory Alteration, Misery, Nostalgia, Obsession, Original Character Death(s), Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psycho, Psychological, Psychological Horror, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Sad, Sad Ending, Sadism, Sadness, Schizophrenia, Screaming, Self-Acceptance, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Shironeki | White-haired Kaneki, Sorrow, Stand Alone, Talking To Dead People, Tissue Warning, Torture, Tragedy, Trauma, afraid, dead, insane, scared, unstable, upset
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-04-24 16:56:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4927645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/protagonistic/pseuds/protagonistic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>disaster befalls even the checkmate kings;</p><p>who shake the fissures of the earth and tear paper sky.</p><p>what makes this tragedy any different?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ring around the rosie

> _"My mind tortures me with happy thoughts while I'm falling asleep. When in reality when I wake up; I know things won't be okay."_
> 
> \- A lonely soul

Kaneki screams until he can't swallow-- until his throat cracks and blood chokes him. His bleeding tongues follow Mr. Lizard Eyes who slices his spine with a shriek of shivering ecstasy, making even Kaneki salivate. His mouth gapes open in a black plead for mercy that refuses to slip his crooked lips. Idle, meaty hands reach into the slit and past lovely muscle, fingering for the spinal cord's protruding, white nubs. Meaty fingers prod deeper, eventually tempting veins around a bloody, pulpy mess, clotting around a slimy artery that throbs with each shuddering breath. Mr. Lizard Eyes watches him with redeeming pleasure in his eyes.

His ribs are bleached and bruised; perverted skin peeling from the enamel. Intestines are atoning, leaving behind blinking bile as they crawl from his belly. A tongue, drowned in teeth, darts from a pair of lips, sweating with sadistic pleasure. A grotesque crack of bones leaves Kaneki's lower jaw hanging in a distorted manner; a skeleton's smile. Hunger crawls from his tongue. **More, More, more, mORe, moRe, MOre, MORe, MOrE, morE, MoRE.**

He wants to gouge out his ear canals and end the aching voice plaguing Kaneki's fleeting humanity with numb words. Screaming -- his -- denies his ears: blurring to a white silence. A glassy tear at the back of his skull resembles someone cutting his eyes out, but he never lost his eyes. Right? As blood runs down his empty sockets and binds him with his darkness; Kaneki begs at his sallow skin with revolting disgust, soured muscle and veiny tendons frame only his false bones.

He opens his eyes. Butterflies flit drearingly around Kaneki's black head with curved, ebony wings. Ghosts against plastic paper. He smiles. The wings begin to melt, dripping to the floor as candle wax. They dribble onto his skin, uncomfortably warm and sticky, gnawing at translucent skin. Yet, his smile does not falter. His eyes become terribly sad.

Lips dance along his jaw and fingertips roam his barren shoulders. He can feel the breath of eyelashes and the seductive curve of eyelids along his cheek. She looks familiar, but he doesn't want to remember pain, or the way her skin eloquently tightens around joints, or how her hair is pulled the side of her neck, exposing the soft, alabaster flesh underneath, or the way her sardonic lips move when she teasingly bit the rims of porcelain cups full of coffee.

 _"You are my sunshine,"_ She breathes into his ear, tracing it with the stencil of her lips, _"My only sunshine,"_

The tar rises, staining his skin with black ink and bleaching his hair to an ugly white; it floods his raw throat and nostrils. Kaneki wants to stand but the chains wrapped around him urge him to sit and drown for a little bit. The tar climbs above his eyes. He shuts them, and sinks into the black depths, ignoring the startled gasp of his constricting lungs. Since when was his eye so red?

So they talk to him. _"Mother? Mother? Is that you? Why are you screaming? Delightful, isn't it?"_

_"You make me happy, when skies are grey." again. again. again. again. again. again. again. "You'll never know, how much I love you."_

Sometimes a devil, hunched over a corpse (if either is human he does not mind anymore), kneels in front of Kaneki. He only sees the curve of its spine, each nub prominent beneath the black jumpsuit it wears; stretched across its body as a second skin. The sickening squelch of flesh being shamefully chewed and swallowed; needles in his ears! The demon holds a serpentine tongue between its fingers, forked and pale pink, above its head poising to eat it. Slurping the tongue in a single, fluid motion; it stands, back to Kaneki. Its white hair is matted with streaks of deluded scarlet. Blood runs down its arms as in small prayers down his chalky skin.

 _"I'm hungry, hungry, hungryhungryhungry, h u n g r y,"_ The devil is redundant in its rotting sins; voice identical to the one in Kaneki's head. Shivers of lust race down its back; snapped breaths and ragged gasps tear from its throat. Laughter bubbles around its mouth, but it sounds panicked, almost forced. Its lips morph into a twisted smile.

 _"C-Centipedes-s i-in my ear-rs,"_ It hysterically complains slowly, as its neck twists around. Kaneki's screams leap in pitch attempting to swallow the room. _It is so noisy, please just, just... silence_. White silence. A horrifying, hooked beak bulges over its face, like the masks medieval doctors wore to not become plagued by the black, but he's already so black. In the center, a red, glassy iris gleams with an onyx sclera. Spidery, crimson threads run from the iris and onto skin, at the corner of its eye. Madness--pure insanity--possesses its body. The devil's smile slightly wavers and its eye twitches-- a violent turmoil. Its knees buckle and it yanks at its hair, holding the silver strands with curled knuckles; a fallen angel who has long since been martyred. 

_"White child, have I hurt you again?"_ It screams (such a sad sound?) beside panic. Abruptly the creature silences and stands, taking an unsteady step forward with an arm outstretched in Kaneki's direction. Kaneki squirms, a guttural noise tears itself from his ruined throat.

 _"Kaneki, you are a dead Savior."_ The creature chides mournfully as it stands in front of him. Softly, its fingers brush across Kaneki's cheek. Ice cold and dead. Goosebumps bloom across Kaneki's arms in a disgusted, sick recoil. The devil tentatively steps toward him and wraps around his chest; one hand over his heart and the other along his collarbone. Kaneki doesn't shove the dead hands from his body, he's too afraid of what might happen (nothing happens). In an instant, warm slender arms replace the repulsive cold. He closes his eyes. His illusion of home slips through his cage of fingers like fine sand. And so when the liquid sun rises and melts silver shadows painted by the moon, the only thing remaining is a broken promise and the touch of clammy skin against his. Only echoes fade with time, but the words never dilute.

_"So please don't take, my sunshine away."_


	2. a pocket full of posie

> _"I'm not much of a good person anymore, maybe I never was."_
> 
> \- Unknown

At first, everything was a brilliant white.

White carnations blur together against a milky strewn sky; they smell of honey and buttermilk-- a heavy velvet. Kaneki sits upon a tarnished, wooden throne with an elbow bent along the worn, velveteen rests; his head cradled into his palm and his other hand hushes by a gnarled stem with sharp thorns that burrow under his skin like wishing paper. He feels the chair clawing with sharp splinters of the dead behind his eyes and above his throat; a king with no subjects.

"Mirrors of bronze like to taunt as you do." says a reflecting devil. In the darkened glass he glares like smudged noise, an ugly scar. Empty eyelids say no. Between the reflection's counting bones, a flesh tearing tarot card depicting the number twelve and a man laughing down, bound to a guilty shame hangs. _The Hanging Man._

A cruel, silent heaven; chains whispered. Parting coal, skeleton's jaw limply to loose flesh. Full of skin and slicker affairs. Trembling hands and quaker limbs.

"Making a deal with Death?" It woefully rasps with thin lips and grimy eyes. Threading fog from God's musing. Pulled from jelly eyes, to the other side. The room is a board game of chess and checkers, but long since sick of these moaning metaphors. The glass gone. In place, a steeled chair with a table adjacent. A cup of coffee, steam slowly rolling off it. The devil is also gone, perhaps he too passed through the mirror, leaving him alone with black noise. He sits in the chair, muttering down bitter liquid, ignoring the tiny, black spiders crawling along his skin.

Kaneki is not sure when the angel appeared, nor does he truly care. Knelt to a rosary hymn, a confession to silence tears, it begs this god forgiveness of sins it committed. The angel holds a forsaken look, almost convincing Haise of its sorrow.

 _"Why is it that the beautiful things are entwined more deeply with death than with life?"_ The angel asks the painful silence, a harsh hand against Haise's cheek, curved and gentle: his mother's touch. He is crossing under the bridge whom no returns, one that blows damp with unpleasant dandelion seeds.

Kaneki blinks awake with rancid contorts of afraid illness; a pair of boys. One with jam hair and honey hues, smiling; his hand reaches out to another boy with black hair and Bambi grey eyes who clutches a book to his chest-- the soft spoken kid who never quite fit.

_"Let's just go home already."_

Pliers are clamping onto his fingers. Irritating agony for simpering Ken! Centipedes crawling in his ears. That laughter, who is it coming for? The stench of bitter blood. Hunger, a raw pain of starvation.

Familiar broken fingers cover his eyes and a white child's voice shakes with innocent fear from a martyr.

_"Please don't erase me,"_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks
> 
> dedicated to those who continue
> 
> please comment


	3. ashes, ashes

> _"Sickness, insanity, and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life."_
> 
> \- Edvard Munch

__

_"How validating, I think I heard the centipede whispering."_ Charred fingernails brush spines of curtained books. Bleached locks and muttering voices. Ken Kaneki lays in a mangled sheet, ignoring the voice as it flits at the corners of vision. Always in the corner of the room; watching. With eyes of the dead and skin like rotting flesh.

 

"Monsters don't exist during the day." Kaneki says as he sits up in bed, his back to the figure. Lips turn to a sneer beside him, whispering empty laughter into his barren skull. His spine arches with each black nail against a swollen scab. Hilarious delirium intoxicates his body. Kaneki's fingers twitch as if pair of lips are pressing into his skin. A hazy fog falls across his mind and a flutter beneath his ribs, makes breathing difficult. It was laughable at how Kaneki had begun to grow accustomed to the constant presence of the demon in his head-- how he romanticized, glorified, worshiped the figure. Kaneki begins to slowly fantasize the death of the white-haired devil who bares a human mask and preys on thoughts; grotesque thoughts.

 

Kaneki stares at its red eyes with slightly parted lips, strangely beautiful when washed black by a dead man's hand. When he swallows, a roots grows from his throat blooming in his mouth: choking him. The thorns catch along his esophagus and tear his skin like tissue paper. When Kaneki tries plucking the rose from his mouth, an ivory skeletal hand strokes his face. Kaneki gapes at the skull's broken jaw that speaks with the same voice as him. He can feel roots entwining within his head; replacing his eyes with red buds that bloom: blinding him.

 

Kaneki drifts between awaking world and a place of desolation. He blinks out of existence, like the whites of dead eyes. Once, he found himself walking a strange street with looming buildings that laughed at him, over, and over, and over-- holding a pale yellow, grey-winged bird close to his heart, cradling it. Visions of blood spurting from a gaping hole in his chest, red spider lilies growing from his bones, and glass shattering against a floor filled his mind. Horror entombed his heart once he realized he had torn off a grey wing with a star imprinted on it, leaving the bird confused and broken.

 

 _"Loser, loser, loser."_ Grinned the bird.

 

He knows that he is rotten to the core, like the tawdry and gaudy finery of spoiled fruits. He is the jester of clowns bringing bloodied frowns to the faces of porcelain dolls. Thoughts of black hair and ghoulish masks with beakish faces belittle his vices. Kaneki does not know whether to laugh or mourn for the loss of his sanity. This laden madness feels suiting-- a bleak resemblance to his diminished tendencies. He can feel the hands of someone else's pressing into his palms, a ghost, perhaps, the phantom of himself. Kaneki knows that it is only his lost thoughts swirling emptily in the air. Brassy voices fill his ears. Sometimes Kaneki turns his head away, only to find that the monologue comes from inside his mind.

 

Garish flames lick at his skin, encasing him in blackened burns that curl with dark smoke. The fire feeds off his bones, leaving them charred and broken as his mind. Fire doesn't scare him anymore, but his breath hitches all the same. He delights in the agony that beckons him to sleep and dream of lies. His fingers bleed to ash and Kaneki's wails synchronize with the clashing cords of a piano playing within his mind ( _Chopin_ , he thinks). Slowly, his bitter skin peels away and the fire leaves his ribs splintered. Kaneki closes his eyes and allows the flames to devour his body.


	4. we all fall down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"At least I hope I taste good."_

>   
>  _"Don't you understand? I don't deserve a happy ending."_
> 
> _\- 6/5/2015, 10:53 PM_

A women's shifting lips. Cutting teeth as parasites crawling through Kaneki's ears. Bleak and bloodied, with each withered word that goes, tap-tap-tap. His head throbs with each syllable punctured. A traitor to the thoughts. Itching ears with the sporadic twitching of an insects body. From his ear canal, he beckons to a red centipede, squirming and stained with shadows. His expression is one of amused consideration. The centipede has blinding breaths with choking eyes. Placing it on his second tongue, Kaneki swallows it.

The insects digs into his throat crawling down his throat with spidery legs and intwining with his ribs. He holds a straw doll with a sewn smile and crude black hair stitched on with two black buttons for eye. He sees a white reaper take a look at him. The pain-- unbearable misery --makes him scream until his throat wells up with blood and he chokes, swallowing and vomiting it in red puddles. He smiles, why is he smiling? Stop smiling.

_"I know I will be eaten like a kid."_

Kaneki reverently takes his left eye into his hands and pinches it; scrambling his brain with a pleasant squish. His fingers grub at his empty socket, trying to replace the absence with eyes older than they were supposed to be. He tries to speak, a gurgle through blood-clotted pipes. He forces laughter, for he was hilarious or very tragic.

Eventually the monster inside Kaneki stands beside him. Peeling skin stretched across broken bones as empty sockets stare back blankly. Its lips are loosely stitched together with red thread that bleeds black blood as they wordlessly move to a eulogy of silent words. Its lips stop trembling and pull back in a malformed sneer. Kaneki grins at the monster.

But why, why is he carrying this broken boy home? To where they like to sleep with knives in their chest? This contradiction of tripping nails across his cheek, gently, nails scratching. Bleaching fingernails back to flesh and a regretting unfaithful Kaneki; nods. The black angel kneels behind him sobbing. Kaneki is overcome with a fit of giggles at the sight of the wretched deity, as dull mandibles grind the grey matter of his brain. Sharp, rusty nails pierce the nape of Kaneki's neck, through several nerves, but he continues snickering. The laughter silences the dead rasp of people he's forgotten.

 _"What do you desire?"_ The angel riddles as its hand curves to Kaneki's cheek holding a denying smile to his blistering lips (don't let go, don't let go, oh God, please don't let go). Feeding him truths out of it's hands, that he gulps earnestly.

"Silence." Black noise plays in his head and his mind falls victim to the tasteless static. His bones are eaten away by the darkness that leaves a bittersweet taste in his mouth. Of storm's that cry and a sun that dies. A world conceived of replacement by blank silences and shallow intuitives. He obliges the cravings of Death too easily, and he is swallowed as an ashtray.

_"At least I hope I taste good."_  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dedicated to those who stayed with me!
> 
> please comment

**Author's Note:**

> thanks
> 
> dedicated to those lost boys
> 
> please comment


End file.
